Complete Independence Day Omnibus, The

by Molstad, Stephen

  Faisal then offered the pilots a perfunctory salute and withdrew to the air-conditioned comfort of his tent, adjourning the meeting without having spoken a single word.

  “You will follow me to the supplies,” shouted the captain, turning on his heels and marching away. The pilots looked at one another in confusion before following. Was that it? Between them, they had a thousand urgent questions about the situation in the rest of the world and what the Saudis planned to do. The captain heard their grumbling. When they returned to the C-230 cargo plane, he paused at the foot of the access ramp. “There will be another meeting tonight. You may discuss your questions with Faisal at that time.”

  The huge plane was the supply depot for the camp. The crates and storage tanks stacked inside held enough provisions to sustain the troops for several weeks. Tye was the first one inside the plane. Rubbing his hands together eagerly, he faced a gray-haired supply officer across a small table.

  “I’d like a big juicy cheeseburger, please, no pickles. And a side of chips.”

  The supply officer blinked in confusion before handing Tye a large bundle that included a four-man tent, a plastic water bucket, blankets, a first-aid kit, and a copy of the Koran. Heading back down the ramp, Tye thumbed through the book, disappointed. “This is all in Arabic,” he complained to Reg, “and there’s no pictures.”

  Reg looked around and noticed a group of soldiers lounging in the shade beneath the cargo plane. One of them stood up and came trotting into the sunlight.

  ‘Teacher!” he shouted. “I can’t believe it. Major Cummins, how are you? How did you find us here?”

  “We were in the neighborhood and thought we’d stop by to say hello.” Reg smiled.

  The Saudi officer was in his late twenties, light on his feet, and wore a flashy gold chain around his neck. His striking green eyes and dashing good looks gave him the appearance of a young movie star. His lips curled into a mischievous grin below his light mustache. The two men shook hands then kissed on each cheek, in the Arab style.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Reg said, shaking his head in disbelief. “Khalid Yamani is here.” Of all the Saudi pilots Reg Cummins had trained, of course it would be this one who found him here. “I see you’re loafing in the shade, as usual.”

  “No, no, Teacher,” Yamani protested good-naturedly. “As always, I am working very hard. I wanted to keep working but these men,” he said, gesturing to his friends, “they are soft. They begged me to give them a short break because they could not keep up with me. What could I do?”

  The other soldiers heard him lying and shouted a few comments of their own. Khalid waved them off and flashed Reg a disarming, high-wattage smile.

  Khalid Yamani was probably the worst student Reg had ever tried to teach, but also one of his favorites. He was an easily distracted, sometimes reckless pilot and at first Reg had been mystified over why he had been promoted to the advanced tactical fighter school. Only when he tried to have the young man sent down—for his own safety—did he learn that Khalid’s father was one of the richest and most influential men in Saudi society, an oil baron with vast, worldwide holdings who kept close personal counsel with the king.

  Reg was a respected and well-liked teacher but he was also very demanding. He had absolutely no tolerance for sloppiness and lack of concentration. At first, his students didn’t understand the ferocious anger he turned on them when they made lazy errors, but eventually someone would tell them, explaining in whispers or waiting until Reg wasn’t around to hear.

  Khalid had driven him crazy on several occasions, but the young man had such a charming, good-natured way about him that Reg could never stay angry for very long. Khalid’s love of life was so infectious that he’d occasionally managed to drag Reg with him to off-base parties, swanky, secretive affairs held in private homes where upper-class Saudis dressed in Western-style clothing and sipped alcohol. The parties were an open secret and were rarely disturbed by the religious police, as long as they remained behind closed doors. Khalid, a handsome fighter pilot and eligible bachelor from a wealthy family, was invited to many such gatherings and never missed the opportunity to attend. He reveled in Western habits, being largely westernized himself. He’d spent his high school years in Houston, Texas, while his father bought and reorganized an oil company there.

  “As a matter of fact, Teacher, I’ve been expecting to see you. The men have been talking about a trick someone used against the aliens—using chaff to blind them. I said to myself, ‘Self, that sounds like Reg Cummins.’”

  “You heard about that?” Tye asked, impressed.

  “It wasn’t me,” Reg said quickly. “It was this beanpole of a mechanic here. He flew a very respectable flight.” He introduced the two men, who shook hands warmly.

  “The major is just being modest,” Tye said. “I fired off the chaff, but he was the one who came up with the idea. I was too busy wetting myself to come up with anything that clever.”

  The three of them continued talking until all of the representatives had received their supply packages. As they started back, Khalid took Reg by the arm and led him in a different direction. “Stay a while, Teacher, there’s someone I’d like you to meet. But first I have a question: Can we win?”

  “That’s the question of the hour isn’t it?” Reg thought for a minute before answering. “I’d say we’ve got a snowball’s chance in hell.”

  “Ah,” grinned Khalid, “excellent! Then there is a chance.” He gestured toward a row of private jets. ‘Teacher, my father is here. He is not well, and I know it would ease his pain to meet you. Would you mind?”

  It wasn’t an offer Reg could very well refuse. “I’d be honored.”

  The two of them moved along the perimeter of the Saudi tent town, maintaining a low profile, until they reached a luxury Learjet tied down near the lip of the plateau. The sun was low on the horizon and the heat was lifting. Reg noticed a large tent standing by itself quite some distance from the rest of the camp.

  “What’s going on out there?” he asked.

  Khalid shook his head sadly. “They are calling it the Tent of the Fearful. Since the demons began to arrive, many people are losing their minds. Last night, they screamed and screamed. No one could sleep.”

  “I don’t hear anything now.”

  “Morphine,” Khalid explained before climbing a set of steps. The Yamani family crest was painted prominently on the exterior of the plane. Khalid paused on the top step and turned to Reg. “When I told you my father was not well…” He didn’t finish the thought, but gestured meaningfully toward the Tent of the Fearful before heading inside.

  The interior of the plane was a different world. It was a soothing, air-conditioned place with art on the walls and plush carpeting. There was a kitchenette/dining area with marble countertops and leather upholstery.

  Khalid stepped through an interior doorway into his father’s room and turned down the volume on a wall-mounted television set. Karmal Yamani was a frightened, unshaven, elderly man with bloodshot eyes. He lay on a narrow bed, his head propped up by a spray of golden pillows. While vice minister of petroleum exports, he and his brother had been the chief architects of the 1973 oil embargo, an exercise in economic brinksmanship that had quadrupled his nation’s wealth almost overnight. He was known as one of the most shrewd and powerful men in the Middle East, but none of that was evident at the moment.

  “Father! I have excellent news,” Khalid said very loudly. “Here is a great friend of mine, Major Reg Cummins. He was over Jerusalem when the attack began. He tells me that the aliens are very strong, but he is confident that we can beat them. He believes we can win the war!”

  The old man pushed himself up into a sitting position and a looked at Reg hopefully. “How? How can we defeat them?”

  Reg silently cursed Khalid for putting him on the spot. He didn’t want to lie, but telling the truth threatened to crush the old man’s fragile spirit.

  He hesitated, choosing his words ca
refully. “Well, for one thing, we’ve discovered we can blind them temporarily. We’re studying how to use that to our advantage,” Reg said. “Besides, sir, human beings are a tough lot. We always seem to find a way.”

  “Blind them, you say?” The elder Yamani’s self-control was returning. He straightened his clothes and apologized for his appearance. “It is embarrassing for me to receive you like this, major, but since the spaceships arrived I have not been a well man.”

  “We’re all in a state of shock,” Reg said. “It’s very understandable.”

  “Yes, my condition is not uncommon during wartime”—Yamani nodded—“but it is a very dangerous one. Great fear can be contagious, spreading from man to man until an entire army can no longer fight. We must quarantine those whose knees have turned to water, as mine have. This is the same advice I gave to Ghalil Faisal. Are there any such men among the foreign pilots?”

  “One or two,” Reg answered.

  “You must isolate them immediately! Move them to the tent in the desert with the others! Khalid, arrange this with Faisal.”

  Each time Khalid heard his father mention Faisal’s name, he made a sour face and pretended to spit on the floor. “The man is a swine,” he said with a vehemence Reg didn’t understand.

  Just then, a jet fighter screamed overhead and Mr. Yamani’s composure collapsed completely. He rolled away from the window near his bed, shielding himself with the blanket. Khalid went to his side and tried to comfort him as Reg stood by awkwardly. Although the old man could diagnose his condition, he was obviously helpless to control it. Eventually, Khalid led Reg out of the room and back to the kitchen area.

  “Thank you, Teacher,” he said, pulling bottles of French mineral water from a refrigerator and sliding into one of the seats at the table. “He is more at ease now.” Reg took a couple of dates from a bowl and popped them in his mouth as Khalid poured. “Now, tell me what happened over Jerusalem, Teacher, every detail. Together we will discover a weakness, a way to fight them.”

  Reg swirled the water in his glass. “I could use something stronger if you’ve got it,” he said.

  Khalid started to get up, but quickly changed his mind. “It would be unwise of me to offer you alcohol on my father’s plane, but I will try to send a package to your tent this evening.” He pointed forward and aft, indicating there were others aboard the jet.

  After much prodding, Reg began to recount the one-sided battle he’d fought that day. Up to that moment, he’d been doing his best to keep the memory of it buried, but now he let the scene flood back to him. He talked about the enormous firing cone and the circular wall of destruction it had unleashed. He described the missiles exploding against the giant ship’s shields, the illfated dogfight with the scarab attack ships. In a very real sense, the memory of the massacre was more devastating than the event itself. Several times during the retelling, Reg had to stop and gather himself before going on. And each time he did so, he would glance out the portal and see the Tent of the Fearful in the deepening twilight.

  During one of these pauses, a door opened and a beautiful young woman in her early twenties stepped into the dining area. Tall and slender, she wore her lustrous mane of coal black hair pulled back into a thick ponytail. She was dressed in blue jeans and a T-shirt bearing the logo of Stanford University. Reg’s eyes couldn’t help lingering over the curves of her body. It had been a long time since he’d seen a Saudi woman in anything except a black shroud, and longer still since he’d seen a woman as beautiful as the one that stood before him. One look into her bright green eyes told him she had to be Khalid’s sister.

  Khalid was not happy to see her. The moment she showed herself, he began shouting in Arabic and waving her out of the room. She studiously ignored him, casually moving to a set of cabinets above the sink. When she stood on her toes and reached for the handles on the high doors, the T-shirt climbed her torso revealing the clear dark skin on her stomach and the small of her back. Reg reached nervously for his water glass without looking away, without even blinking.

  Khalid sprang to his feet, showering her in curses and demanding that she return to her quarters. He pounded his fist on the table, spilling his water. This finally cracked the young woman’s cool demeanor. She turned away from the cabinets and shouted back venomously at her brother before approaching the table.

  “This must be the English pilot you’ve spoken of so often,” she said to her brother in a flawless American accent. “You never mentioned that he was so handsome.” If the comment was designed to get under Khalid’s skin, it worked. He erupted into a fresh round of shouting. She ignored him and locked eyes with Reg. “Forgive my brother’s idiotic behavior. He pretends to be progressive but he’s a very typical Saudi male chauvinist pig.” With that, she left the room leaving the two men in silence.

  “Well, that was interesting,” Reg said, pouring Khalid a fresh glass of water. “I’ve never seen you react like that to a Saudi woman in Western clothes.”

  “My sister!” Khalid said, scowling at the closed door. “She has always been defiant, but now it is worse, much worse. Since she returned from America, she does nothing but make trouble. I apologize that you had to see her like that.”

  Reg hadn’t exactly minded. In fact, he thought of asking Khalid to invite her back in, but decided to say nothing.

  “We are seeing this problem more and more in Saudi Arabia,” Khalid told him.

  “What problem is that?”

  “These girls,” he said with a dismissive wave. “They return from university in Europe or America with the idea of challenging the man’s authority. They rebel against everything, mindlessly. It lasts until they marry and begin to bear children.”

  Reg bit into another date. From an Englishman’s perspective, the way Saudi women were treated amounted to legalized slavery. They were kept virtual prisoners in their own homes and had few legal rights to protect them from the whims of their husbands, fathers and brothers. Some years earlier, the entire English military presence had withdrawn from the country in protest when a Saudi father legally executed one of his daughters by drowning her in the family swimming pool after finding her alone with an unmarried man. The man was not charged.

  Khalid sat down and sipped his water, then whispered across the table. “Fadeela is an especially unhappy and willful girl. I am sad to say that the blame for this must rest largely with my father. He has allowed her to develop unrealistic expectations about her future.”

  “Such as?”

  “It is not important,” Khalid said with a sudden, broad smile. “But I pity the man who takes her one day to be his wife. He will be buying himself a lifetime of headaches. But enough! We have more important matters to discuss.”

  Still convinced he could discover a chink in the alien armor by listening to Reg’s account, Khalid began quizzing him on every aspect of their technology. But they were soon interrupted again, this time by a knock on the outer hatch. A soldier had arrived with an important message. Khalid excused himself and spoke to the man outside.

  Reg hungrily filled his mouth with dates and studied the richly appointed interior of the jet. He was still chewing when a door opened and Fadeela returned. He watched her reach into the cabinet above the sink and retrieve a bottle of brandy then slide into the seat across from him. She poured drinks into a pair of fresh glasses and leaned toward him intensely.

  “I’ve been listening to you talk to my fool brother. Before he comes back, I want you to tell me your plan for defeating the invaders.”

  Reg’s eyes opened wide. Plan? He didn’t have so much as a single solid idea, much less anything that could be called a plan. But his mouth was too full of sweet, sticky fruit to say any of this to the woman staring at him across the table. He held up a finger and chewed rapidly. Hoping to clear his mouth, he took a swig of the drink she’d poured him. While it was an excellent brandy, it was also the first alcohol to pass his lips for many months. He shuddered and coughed as it crashed through h
is system. It was some moments before he was able to speak.

  “Here’s the thing, Miss Yamani, I don’t have a plan. I don’t think anyone does. We’ve never seen anything like this before, and at the moment, my only plan is to stay alive long enough to make a plan.”

  “Unacceptable,” she said, shaking her head in disappointment. “We cannot simply wait here, huddled in the desert, while the world goes up in flames. They’re moving, you know. They’re moving toward a fresh set of targets. While you sit here chattering with Khalid and eating dates, we’re being systematically exterminated.”

  Systematically exterminated. The ugly phrase put a knot in Reg’s stomach and he reached for the bottle. “What about you?” he asked, pouring. “Do you have any ideas?”

  For the first time, Fadeela’s expression softened. She seemed surprised to be asked for her opinion. “Of course I have ideas. But this is Saudi Arabia and none of the men in charge is interested in what a woman might have to say.”

  “I’m listening,” Reg said evenly.

  “We need to find a way to penetrate their shields. How can we circumvent them? Are they vulnerable to electricity? To chemicals? Maybe to something as simple as water? We must try everything. What about nuclear weapons? We should be laying plans to attack their mother ship which is out in space. Perhaps that one does not have shields. There are still a thousand options.”

  Reg nodded seriously, as if he were considering her ideas despite their obvious impracticality. It didn’t take Fadeela long to realize what he was doing.

  “Don’t patronize me, Major Cummins,” she hissed. “It is true that I have no military training, but at least I realize the need to find a solution as quickly as possible. And the first thing I would change is that you foreigners should not be kept in isolation. We should all be talking to one another, searching for a strategy. We need more communication, not less. But that idiot Faisal does everything he can to keep you divided. It is easier to control you that way.”